TY - JOUR
AU - Bayne, Caroline N
AB - The nonsense Latin phrase nolite te bastardes carborundorum, scratched into the closet baseboard in The Handmaid’s Tale and subsequently reborn as a hashtag, fits neatly into the legacy of feminist forms of self-publishing. These forms often rely on personal knowledge and lived experiences to generate and circulate meaning, and to bring this knowledge into public spaces as a form of activism specific to those able to solve the puzzle. Feminist forms of self-publishing offer a lineage of collective meaning making and knowledge generation practices beginning with scrapbooking in the early 1900s, in which women would archive personal ephemera alongside newspaper clippings and current events, often writing commentary and corrections to best describe and document their daily lived experiences (Piepmeier, 2009), sexual health pamphlets in the 1920s, consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s, zine culture in the 1990s, and in a multitude of ways in the now, including feminist trolling practices and meme hive-minds.1 Nolite te bastardes carborundorum is a gibberish phrase of broken Latin described by Atwood as a middle-school joke. Tracing the hashtag from its origins in Atwood’s 1985 book to its current material state, I argue that the phrase and, specifically, the hashtag, function as a contemporary form of feminist self-publishing; a cut-and-paste way of meaning-making. Through its circulation, the phrase becomes imbued with meaning and transformed into a powerful tool of resistance. The content posted with the nolite te bastardes carborundorum hashtag ranges from selfies, art, protest fliers, tattoos, and photos of handmaid activism, from women in full handmaid regalia protesting the Ohio abortion bill (Associated Press, 2017; see Figure 1) to signs reading “The Handmaid’s Tale Wasn’t Meant to be an Instructional Manual,” and “Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again.” One of the most important aspects of feminist forms of self-publishing is their intention to yield material change from discursive beginnings. This intentionality towards material effects is evident in the hashtag; hashtags prompt discussion and collectivizing, and seek to yield results. This then calls for a reassessment of the terms slacktivism, armchair activism, and the like, which frame online activism as less purposeful or productive. There has been a long-standing need for a reevaluation of feminist forms of organizing: the private, seemingly apolitical often serves public, political function. Historically-regarded apolitical artifacts and spaces—the diary, social media, a girl’s bedroom—provide marginalized groups with accessible spaces and technologies to enact the initial stages of resistance. Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Handmaid’s protest Ohio abortion bill. Figure 1 View largeDownload slide Handmaid’s protest Ohio abortion bill. Circulating knowledge outside of dominant structures offers psychically- and physically-threatened groups ways to collectivize and resist. The forms these knowledges travel through shift according to technological advances and individual access to these technologies. While June discovered the phrase carved into a closet baseboard, the ability of current technologies to disperse knowledge and the hashtag in particular have become intertwined with political protest. The phrase originally exists in a private space, scrawled into being by an unknown individual and seen by June, who takes up the phrase to sustain herself. However, as the phrase has migrated into the hyper-visible realm of the internet and into public, offline spaces, we can clearly see the symbiosis between these social spaces, and perhaps the needlessness of separating the public and the private into distinct spheres. The historical tendency to separate attributes of the public and private social spaces, in which the public is privileged as active, democratic, and masculine and the private as feminine, personal, and emotional, sets up a binary hierarchy of importance that dictates how we understand contributions to these spaces as of greater or lesser importance. However, feminist forms of self-publishing seek to challenge dominant understandings of the public and private, to offer points of rupture that suggest the private, especially for marginalized groups, is a politically generative space (see Fraser, 1990; Groeneveld, 2016; Harris, 2004; Kearney, 2006; McRobbie, 1990). The Handmaid’s Tale, circulating pre-Internet, found its home in high school and college classrooms, specifically introductory women’s studies courses. While a fictional text, the material resonance of the book was established early on. The premiere of the television show over 30 years later led to even greater material potential, debuting in 2017 during the rise of an extremist, right-wing political moment and providing audiences with a sobering look into a fictional dystopian future that felt neither particularly futuristic nor fictional (Atwood, 2017). While, certainly, nolite te bastardes carborundurum meant something to audiences of the book and was likely taken up in myriad and interesting ways, the television show and its well-timed debut increased circulation of the phrase through the hashtag on Twitter and Instagram. Thousands of entries, under both #nolitetebastardescarborundurm and the English translation #dontletthebastardsgrindyoudown, speak to the functionality of the phrase in this moment. Additionally, while the English translation exists and is used across social media, the Latin phrase is used nearly as frequently; I find this particularly interesting, insofar as women and individuals choose to represent their micro and macro forms of resistance through a phrase shrouded in layers of meaning, with this resistance perhaps a private nod to others who possess the same knowledge and belong to the same groups. To make use of the Latin phrase requires an understanding of the source material and relies on belonging to an imagined or embodied community, either as an audience member, through live-tweeting the television show with thousands of others, or as a member of an activist group protesting with other women in crimson cloaks and white bonnets. Additionally, the phrase is printed on T-shirts, mugs, and home décor so women can embody the phrase in their daily lives. Its use in political protest spaces signifies the resistant qualities of the phrase as it is taken up by women and moved through time and space, from the bedroom to the streets. The phrase, with its private, micro beginnings, has bloomed into every corner of social media: onto protest signs, bodily forms of protest, and street graffiti (Temple, 2013; see Figure 2). Nolite te bastardes carborundurum, when tattooed on the bodies of women, likely functions as a personal incantation, but when seen by others grows to serve a larger purpose and brings the conversations implicit within the tattoo into a public space: conversations surrounding reproductive rights, rape culture, government brutality, and threats to basic resources and rights of marginalized groups. Figure 2 View largeDownload slide Handmaid’s street graffiti, Emily Blair. Figure 2 View largeDownload slide Handmaid’s street graffiti, Emily Blair. The movement of the phrase is most significant: from its meaningless origins, to its diegetic existence scratched into a baseboard, to its current public presence, speaks to the essentially feminist way knowledge compounds, travels, and experiences cyclical rebirth. Women consistently rely on relationships with each other, discussing shared experiences and oppressions, to circulate knowledge within groups underserved and threatened throughout history; women make meanings to survive and to save each other. As extremist politics resurface, so do inventive and deeply personal (yet broadly resonant) ways to resist. Towards the end of the series, June adds her own carvings into the closet baseboard: “you are not alone.” While this gesture ultimately implies other women will come to seek solace in the closet of their bedroom in the Waterford’s home, it also offers those potentially unable to access the resources necessary to decipher the broken Latin phrase a chance at solace and emotional sustenance. Feminist forms of self-publishing cannot always guarantee macro-level change, but can provide women the resources to take steps towards enacting such change. The micro feeds into the macro; the phrase offered hope to a fictional character, yet when the television show made its debut, it came to life and continues to offer hope in the most nonfictional of ways. The materiality of the phrase and its ability to generate via the hashtag removes the phrase from the private, the fantasy, and gives those threatened by the current ranks of bastards a way to resist, a rallying cry. Note 1 Feminist forms of self-publishing, also called feminist participatory media, and their origins are traced by Alison Piepmeier (2009) in her book, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. She cites Janice Radway’s concept of “insubordinate creativity” (Radway, 2001) to understand the ways girls and women interact with cultural materials to challenge dominant cultural norms; offer points of rupture, critique, and analysis; and make use of cultural materials in identity formation and as oppositional and resistant texts. References Associated Press. ( 2017, July 15). Women protest Ohio abortion bill in ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ garb. Retrieved from http://www.wlwt.com/article/women-protest-ohio-abortion-bill-in-handmaids-tale-garb/10021048 Atwood, M. (Writer). ( 2017, April 26). The handmaid’s tale [Television series]. Los Angeles, CA: MGM Television. Fraser, N. ( 1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. Social Text , ( 25/26), 56–80. doi: 10.2307/466240 Groeneveld, E. ( 2016). Making feminist media: Third-wave magazines on the cusp of the digital age . Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Harris, A. ( 2004). Future girl: Young women in the twenty-first century . New York, NY: Routledge. Kearney, M.C. ( 2006). Girls make media . New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. McRobbie, A. ( 1990). Feminism and youth culture . Basingstoke, England: Macmillan Education. Piepmeier, A. ( 2009). Girl zines: Making media, doing feminism . New York, NY: New York University Press. Radway, J. ( 2001). Girls, zines, and the miscellaneous production of subjectivity in an age of unceasing circulation. Lecture presented at “A Lecture Presented” by the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Writing and the Literacy & Rhetorical Studies Minor, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Temple, E. ( 2013, January 08). Bukowski on brick: Literary graffiti from all over the world. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/bukowski-on-brick-literary-graffiti-from-all-over-the-world/266888/#slide7 © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices)
TI - #nolitetebastardescarborundorum: Self-Publishing, Hashtag Activism, and Feminist Resistance
JF - Communication, Culture & Critique
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcx016
DA - 2018-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/nolitetebastardescarborundorum-self-publishing-hashtag-activism-and-LXWdutvsBa
SP - 201
EP - 205
VL - 11
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -